Education, From The Capitol To The Classroom

Stories about students: How does education policy affect the way students learn and grow? Can schools meet their needs as they balance ramped-up testing with personal changes and busy schedules? And are students who need help getting it?

Stories about educators: How are those responsible for implementing education policy in schools − from classroom teachers, to district administrators, to school board members − affected by changes at the top? And how well do they meet their challenge of reaching students with varying abilities and needs?

Stories about school assessment: With an increased push for 'accountability' in schools, what can test scores tell us about teacher effectiveness and student learning − and what can't they tell us? What does the data say about how schools at all levels are performing?

Stories about government influence: Who are the people and groups most instrumental in crafting education policy? What are their priorities and agendas? And how do they work together when they disagree?

Stories about money: How do local, state, and federal governments pay to support the education policies they craft? How do direct costs of going to school − from textbooks to tuition − hit a parent or student's bottom line? And how do changing budgets and funding formulas affect learning and teaching?

“It could be any donation of any kind. This could be someone sending us $25, it could be someone talking to us about $1 million setting up an endowment where we could invest the principal. It could be someone having set up a gift in their will,” Coffman says.

“Donors are usually very interested in giving scholarship money,” Coffman says.

But as Andrew Rotherham points in a TIME column, universities need a significant critical mass of money to make a dent in student expenses:

Of the U.S. schools in the NACUBO survey, the median endowment size is $90 million. Not too shabby, but at the standard expenditure rate, an endowment that size generates only about $4.5 million in spendable dollars per year. That’s a decent chunk of change, but hardly enough to eliminate student debt and rely on investment returns instead.

As The Chronicle pointed out, total donations to IU actually dropped by more than 13 percent between 2010 and 2011 — but not enough to take the school out of the top 20:

The university’s fund-raising totals are often affected by decisions of the Lilly Endowment, which focuses much of its giving in Indiana and which gave the university’s medical school $60-million in 2010—the third-largest donation in the university’s history. In 2011, he said, the endowment gave the university only about $6-million.